Přehled o publikaci

The link between socio-economic status (SES) and family transitions (of which union/marriage formation is an example) is of great interest to many scholars as the nature of its stratification has wider ramifications for shaping unequal outcomes in society. This paper updates and extends earlier work on SES inequality in marriage formation using a unique test case – a post-socialist country that is uniquely positioned to help researchers solve the ubiquitous analytical problem (of high collinearity) that researchers attempting to isolate the specific contribution of value change and of economic structures to family change need to disentangle. Under the post-socialist transition, we would expect women’s education to matter less for marriage formation, whereas men’s education should become more strongly associated with union transitions. I use retrospective marital/educational histories collected under the Czech Generations and Gender Survey between 2020 and 2022 to test these claims. I use descriptive, non-parametric methods (Kaplan Meier survival curves) in this abstract to capture changes in the association between respondent’s education and first marriage formation across birth cohorts and by respondent’s sex. The paper shows that inequality in marriage entry increased significantly across birth cohorts in Czechia. The increase was much stronger among women (esp. the least educated ones) than among men, which is clearly inconsistent with the theoretical prediction. It seems to refute both the SDT and the economic turbulence theories. We need to seek novel theoretical interpretations of this trend.